In 1767, Anne Catherine Hoof Green became a widow—and the owner of her late husband Jonas Green’s printing press. Hoof Green ran H.E. Green Press, the 94-year publisher of the Maryland Gazette, until her death in 1775.* H.E. Green wasn’t the only 18th century woman-run printer, however. On July 10, 1776, Mary Katherine Goddard printed the Declaration of Independence in the Maryland Journal, according to the Library of Congress, which also recorded approximately 30 female printers in operation at the time.
But, times change. And while women have always had a hand in the publishing industry (usually in creative or editorial capacities), their roles in printing and manufacturing fluctuated as the number of women in the workforce ebbed and flowed during the 20th century. The business world changed irrevocably, though, in the 1970s and ’80s, when women steadily entered the corporate workforce in large numbers. In fact, the Business and Professional Women’s Foundation fact sheet titled “101 Facts on the Status of Working Women” listed the female working population as 18.4 million in 1950. It reported the count had jumped to 68 million by 2003.
“You certainly had to prove yourself,” Valerie Blauvelt, vice president of marketing for Xerox Production Systems Group in Rochester, N.Y., said of her entry into sales thirty years ago. “Nobody was willing to cut you any slack; you had to pass the test, and I think you were evaluated sometimes with the bar being a little bit higher in terms of how you performed. But I think, at the end of the day, it became your track record that enabled you to go forward. And delivering results was really the ticket to entry. That’s probably true for anybody, male or female.”
Since joining Xerox as a sales professional, Blauvelt has served in management and market and product development, as well as her current position—marketing to the printing industry.
Blauvelt’s prior career as a high school teacher gave her a strong base on which to build a new one at Xerox. Interestingly, many of the sales reps Blauvelt first worked with were formerly teachers. “[Teaching skills] tended to work very favorably in terms of creating proposals,” she said, “because how you wrote letters, how you communicated, how you organized your territory—all those kinds of things were related to all the skills that you had to have to be an effective teacher, as well. So, we had an awful lot of women—and men, too—who came into the selling roles from teaching positions.”
Blauvelt also said beginning a business career in sales was a valuable lesson in effective communication and in dealing with a multitude of personalities. “I think [selling is] the best way to learn a business,” she explained. “Having to interface with the customers; having to be able to understand what their requirements are; having to be able to map your portfolio solutions to their specific needs and demonstrate how they can gain value and benefit is a very exciting opportunity,” she added.
Kay Carlton, co-owner and president of Carlton Industries, La Grange, Texas, began working full-time in the printing industry in the late ’70s, when she and her husband incorporated their business. “I took every small-business course our local printers’ organization and small-business administration offered,” she noted. “I am still a member of our local printers’ organization, which makes me a member of [its] national one, and they have never cared whether I was a woman or a man.” Carlton did mention, however, the scarcity of women in executive positions at the onset of her career.
Even though the Carltons’ company grew from a business run out of their garage into a successful manufacturer of signs, tapes, tags, seals and other products, Carlton encountered her fair share of obstacles while learning the market. “At the time I entered the business world,” she remembered, “men were not used to having to compete with women for business, but most of them eventually got used to it. And, if I found out that someone had tried to keep a customer from buying from me by making up some story, I just shrugged it off and tried to prove to the customer I was the better vendor.”
A similarly tenacious attitude also paid off for the CEO/CFO of label, tag and packaging manufacturer International Print & Packaging, Liberty Hill, Texas. Since becoming an offset shop assistant in 1983, Mary T. Scheible has been privy to the industry’s social and technological evolutions. After working in areas such as bindery and accounting, Scheible joined a sales force in the early 1980s. “I was told by my sales manager to ‘hike [up] my skirt’ and I was sure to get the sale,” she said. “In no uncertain terms, I told him I wanted to be seen by my clients for my knowledge [of] the industry, and that the two aspects were not in any way related. I got the sales anyway.”
Although Blauvelt quickly noted that times have dramatically changed, being in sales was sometimes a struggle for her, as well. “Certainly, there were challenging times,” Blauvelt admitted, “there’s no doubt about it, that there were occasions when you did feel a little bit isolated. You were on a team of 10 men ... and sometimes you didn’t fit in quite the same way, or they might be off golfing somewhere on a weekend together and networking in social scenarios that maybe you weren’t included in ... but over time, those things tended to change.”
Scheible still struggles occasionally with gaining vendors’ initial trust, which she attributed to the industry’s predominantly male make-up. “Conversely,” she said, “my clients and prospective clients are more willing to receive my ideas because I am very detail-oriented—they know I will take care of their projects, and am genuinely concerned for their needs.”
While corporate America might have initially showed the same tendency Scheible referred to, it eventually adjusted to the influx of women in the workplace. Xerox’s current executive roster, for example, reflects the growing population of women in the industry. Along with other leaders at Hewlett-Packard and IBM, Xerox CEO and chairman Anne Mulcahy and president Ursula Burns both appeared on Fortune magazine’s “Fifty Most Powerful Women in Business” list in 2006. (Mulcahy was ranked second only to the CEO of PepsiCo. Burns was listed at number 27.) With high-profile examples like these, the younger workforce is now less encumbered by assumptions based on gender than the peers of Blauvelt, Carlton and Scheible might have been. Now, the print industry must adapt instead to the constant upheaval brought on by new technology.
This continuing acclimation infuses print with an unpredictability Blauvelt praised as she encouraged women to enter the field. She believes it’s an environment where women in particular can succeed. “[As the industry is] becoming more high-tech and it’s becoming more sophisticated in terms of workflow and the ability to provide services, I think [it] presents some wonderful opportunities for women,” she noted. “I think women are very good at this consultative selling approach ... and I think that as this industry changes, this focus on communications [and] making communications more relevant is another opportunity for women to excel.” Said Scheible, “This industry is no longer just ink on paper. [Our company is] now a solutions-based vendor with turnkey operations.”
Carlton agreed. “I think [purchasing professionals] today are used to competing with both sexes in college and in the workplace, and that makes it not such a novelty for women to be a leader in any field,” she said. “Young women must understand—if [they] want to succeed, [they] must be tenacious. With the growth of the digital industry, women can jump in and make themselves experts.”
While the industry’s female population might have had to dig in their (high) heels with a little more ferocity to succeed, they no longer have to await an inheritance to have a hand in printing. Instead, the next generation can inherit from their experiences. As Scheible learned and advised, “Surround yourself with knowledgeable people who have the same values and philosophies. Don’t ever compromise what you believe.”
*Maryland State Archives, Volume 438, page 65.
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